Retention starts with onboarding: how to retain your top talent

You spend so much of your time finding great talent; taking them through the interview process, supporting with offer negotiation and ensuring they are prepared for their first day. But what plans do you have in place to ensure you keep them?

Retaining great talent is ongoing, and something that must evolve as the skills and needs of your team change. Developing a retention strategy can seem overwhelming, but in truth retention strategies are largely about continuing to engage your team in the right way at the right time in their career.

Conduct effective onboarding processes

Your retention strategy begins as soon as your new employee joins the team. As the saying goes, first impressions matter. From their first day, your mission should focus on engaging and retaining them, ensuring they are set up for success in your business.

• Have a clearly defined onboarding process with key achievable milestones.
• Sort the paperwork for salary and any benefit requirements as soon as possible.
• Set up a buddy system so your new hire has someone to turn to for any questions and support in their first few weeks.
• You could opt to take your new hire, and the team, out for a first week celebration lunch to foster strong bonds.

Steps to improve long-term retention

Your long-term retention strategy should focus on continuing to keep your talent engaged in your business, and as employees have varying needs and requirements for what makes them ‘happy’, this strategy can be quite broad.

• Recognition and reward can play a huge part in your overall retention. This could look like quarterly team events, annual awards or financial incentives for hitting targets.
• Be sure to offer professional development opportunities so your team continually feel supported in their career, and in turn develop skills to help you progress in the long run.
• One important area is to monitor where you have a higher turnover of staff. This could be due to additional work pressures, poor management, or the need to hire into that department. Overworked staff can lead to…
• Employee burnout! Offering wellness programmes and health insurance shows employees you are there to support them
• Keep communicating with your team, the highs, the lows, general business updates. Open and transparent communication builds trust and brings them along the journey with you.
• And finally, offering up-to-date and comprehensive employee benefits show your investment in your staff, in addition to their base salary. These should be aligned with current market expectations, and consider what your competitors might be offering to incentivise your staff to move.

However, sometimes there is little you can do to stop someone leaving. Whatever the reason may be, it can be a good idea to invest some time and energy into your offboarding process.

Aside from ensuring they have returned any equipment or materials, conducting exit interviews can provide you some unique insight into the on-the-ground feelings of employees in your business, what could have been done to improve their retention and recognise areas you can improve.